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Yet Another Reason to Find God
22 March 2005Finding Christ won't just get you into Australia, it may get you off death row. Or at least it's fair-game for juries to consider a convict's religious conversion when deciding whether or not to deliver a death sentence. Today the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Payton, the case of convicted rapist and killer William Payton who was sentenced to death after a prosecutor had argued that his religious conversion was irrelevant as a mitigating factor -- an incorrect assertion according to the Supreme Court, which argued that the jury could have taken both the brutality of Payton's crime and his new religious convictions into account. According to Payton's lawyers, there are 70 cases of death row inmates whose mitigating factors after a crime, including religious conversion, have not been properly considered by juries due to inadequate instruction.
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